January 22, 2013 AT 2:00 am

Using the Energy Harvester to Power a Wireless Sensor Node

Intriguing proof-of-concept experiment to demonstrate how to power a wireless sensor node via an energy harvester, from Crispytronics.com. Shared with us by Kris Barrett who wrote: “The energy harvester allows you to power low-power devices without batteries using ambient sources such as thermoelectric generators or solar cells. I think that it will be interesting to your readers/customers because it uses popular DIY components such as XBee radio modules, an AVR microcontroller, and a solar cell.”

From the project page:

This blog post has demonstrated one possible way to use the energy harvester to power a wireless temperature sensor. This blog post also demonstrated how to integrate an AVR microcontroller to monitor the power good (PGD) pin, pulse the secondary output enable (VOUT2_EN), and control the transmit frequency. Checkout the GitHub repository for the AVR source code and XBee configurations. Also, checkout the LTC3108 datasheet for more information related to the energy harvester. Finally, checkout the ATMEGA328P datasheet for more information about sleep modes and asynchronous timer operation using a watch crystal. Checkout the energy harvester product page for more information about the energy harvester breakout used in this project.